“And so, upon Matt listening back on a recorded conversation, he realized that his voice had not in fact gotten deeper over the years as he had hoped/thought, but had instead remained in stasis for the past few years and probably would for the foreseeable future. And then he started wearing a Darth Vader mask to cover up this fact. Everywhere. Every. Single. Day. The end.” OK, so it’s really not that big of a deal, but it just feels weird to know I’m walking around with a different voice than I thought I was. Although everyone seems to experience this. I hear people all the time (after watching/listening to a recording) say stuff like,
“OMG, is that what my voice really sounds like!?”
And it totally makes sense. All day, everyday, we seem to be able to see what we look like. We have mirrors and cameras and phones to help make sure we don’t all unknowingly look like monsters. To a certain extent we can even tell how we smell. But how we sound? Pssh, good luck being reminded of that on a daily or weekly basis. People everywhere are walking around with voices they don’t even know they have.
At least, that’s my hypothesis. I actually kind of want to just record everyone I see and play back to them stuff, just to see if they react surprised or not to their voice. But they can’t know. If people know they are being recorded for a purpose, things change. I know I (unconsciously?) seem to do this when I’m recording voice-overs for videos I make. Heck, I think when I was touching up noise stuff in a past video, I took the liberty of also deepening my voice because, you know, voice-over dudes have low voices.
And in real life, apparently my voice is only low if I consciously make it so. At least that’s what I discovered upon listening to a conversation I had recorded as an interview for sociology. How unfortunately unfortunate. And I know it probably isn’t the iPhone I was using distorting things, because my interviewee sounds pretty much like how she sounds in real life.
But it’s weird. I’ve been told just like a few months ago that my voice is pretty deep and manly. Did I have a sore throat then? Was I unconsciously trying to sound a certain way? Or is this the same voice I used during the interview? So many questions….and I could have answers if my roommate wasn’t in the room right now. Dammit, I want to talk high and low into my microphone without looking like a weirdo! Is that too much to ask!? …thank God Spring Break starts this weekend.
“But wait!” you may say. “What does it matter if you have a high or low voice? You’re perfect just the way you are!”
“Well how sweet of you,” I may reply back. “But…I wanna sound cool. And have a big deep voice…like a cool person.”
“But that’s a horri-”
“A cool person. Like Morgan Freeman.”
“Well there’s no arguing with that.”
I rest my case.
suspiciously generic 